linguistics 101 language acquisition - university of...

Linguistics 101 Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition

• All (normal) human children...

• learn a language.

• can learn any language they are exposed to.

• learn all languages at basically the same rate.

• follow the same stages of language acquisition.


• Children’s acquisition of language occurs...

• quickly

• adult-like grammar after about 5-6 years

• without explicit instruction

• uniformly

• uniform stages of acquisition

• uniform results


• What must a child learn?

• The sounds of a language (phonetics)

• The sound patterns of a language (phonology)

• Rules of word-formation (morphology)

• How words combine into phrases/sentences (syntax)

• How to derive meaning from a sentence (semantics)

• How to properly use language in context (pragmatics)

• Lexical items (words, morphemes, idioms, etc)

Innateness Hypothesis

• Living organisms have innate behaviors:

• newly-hatched see turtles move toward ocean

• honeybees perform dance for communication

• birds fly

• The ‘Innateness Hypothesis’ argues that our ability to acquire (human) language is innate (genetically encoded).

• not simply derived from other human cognitive abilities

• Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Innateness Hypothesis

• Attempts to Explains:

• speed of acquisition

• ease of acquisition

• uniformity of acquisition process

• uniformity in adult language

• universalities across languages

Universal Grammar

• Universal Grammar (UG) refers to the “set of structural characteristics shared by all languages”

• Innateness Hypothesis takes UG to be innate.

• UG is not, however, dependent on innateness hypothesis.

• The goal of theoretical linguistics is to discover the properties of UG.

Sign Language - Innateness of UG

• Overview of sign languages:

• have gesture system (cf. phonology)

• have morphology rules

• have syntactic rules

• have semantic rules

• have dictionary of arbitrary signs

• Support for innateness:

• acquired without explicit instruction

• acquired in similar stages as spoken language

Sign Language – Innateness of UG

• Case Study: Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL)

• NSL didn’t exist before 1980.

• School for deaf children opened.

• Teachers used only limited signs (for the alphabet).

• The deaf children naturally and quickly created their own sign language.

• NSL quickly became a full-fledged language.

(For more info about new languages arising in such a manner, see Files 12.3 and 12.4 (Pidgins and Creoles))

Theories of Acquisition

1. Imitation

2. Reinforcement

3. Active Construction of a Grammar

4. Connectionist Theories

Imitation

• Main idea: children imitate what they hear

• Evidence:

• Specific languages are not transferred genetically.

• Words are arbitrary, thus children must hear them to ‘imitate’ them.

Imitation

• Problems:

• Children produce things not said by adults.

• Children’s ‘mistakes’ are predictable and consistent.

• Children often fail to accurately mimic adult utterances.

• Children produce and understand novel sentences.

• Children may invent a new language in the right circumstances.

Reinforcement

• Main idea: children learn through positive and negative reinforcement

• Evidence:

• very little

Reinforcement

• Problems:

• ignores how children initially learn to produce utterances

• rarely occurs

• fails when it does occur

• fails to explain

• children’s own grammar rules

• why children seem impervious to correction

• Role of reinforcement limited to ability to be understood or not.

Imitation / Reinforcement

Child: Nobody don’t like me.

Mother: No, say ‘Nobody likes me.’

Child: Nobody don’t like me.

(dialogue repeated eight times)

Mother (now exasperated): Now, listen carefully. Say ‘Nobody likes me.’

Child: Oh, nobody don’t likes me.

Imitation / Reinforcement

Child: My teacher holded the baby rabbit and we patted them. Adult: Did you say that your teacher held the baby rabbit? Child: Yes. Adult: What did you say she did? Child: She holded the baby rabbit and we patted them. Adult: Did you say she held them tightly? Child: No, she holded them loosely.

Active Construction of a Grammar

• Children invent grammar rules themselves.

• Ability to develop rules is innate.


• Acquisition process:

• Listen

• Try to find patterns

• Hypothesize a rule for the pattern

• e.g. past tense /-ed/

• Test hypothesis

• Modify rule as necessary

• i.e. Children have a ‘working grammar’.


• Explains what imitation/reinforcement can’t:

• children are expected to make mistakes

• children are expected to follow non-random patterns

• regression

• Explains why children fail to accurately produce adult forms

• child grammars differ from adult grammars

• Problems:

• says nothing about what patterns are learnable

Connectionist Theories

• Claims that exposure to language develops and strengthens neural connections.

• Higher frequency → stronger connections

• allows for exploitation of statistical information

• ‘rules’ derived from strength of connections

• Evidence:

• there are clear frequency effects in some aspects of language

• e.g. ‘blick’ tests conforming to frequency of sound sequences

• there are clearly neural connections

• e.g. easily seen with linguistic priming tests

• predicts ‘errors’ based on frequency effects

• e.g. sing-sang-sung, ring-rang-rung → ding-*dang-*dung

Connectionist Theories

• Problems:

• predicts that any pattern is learnable by humans, but this is demonstrably false

Summary of Theories

• To account for language acquisition: • Imitation is necessary but not sufficient.

• Reinforcement is virtually unsupported.

• Active Construction of a Grammar nicely accounts for predictable

deviations from adult grammars, and the various stages of grammar development.

• Connectionist theories account for frequency effects, can also account for regular deviations from adult grammars.

• Active Construction of a Grammar and Connectionist Theories are not mutually exclusive.

• To account for linguistic universals and the absence of certain patterns in language, we must assume a type of Universal Grammar.

Critical Period

• Is there a ‘critical’ period for language?

• child vs. adult language learning

• native vs. nonnative speakers

• cf. age of immigration and language ability

• arrive before age 6 generally pass as native speakers

• arrive after puberty generally do not pass as native speakers

Critical Period Hypothesis

• basic idea: there is a critical period in development during which a language can be acquired like a native speaker

• strong hypothesis: after this critical period, it is impossible to acquire a language as well as a native speaker

• weak hypothesis: there are ‘sensitive periods’ during which the ease of learning certain aspects of language decline

• different aspects of language (e.g. phonology, syntax) have different sensitive periods

Critical Period Hypothesis

• Evidence:

• ‘feral children’

• ‘Genie’

• isolated for 13 years

• similar stages of language acquisition as children (1-word, 2-word...)

• learned many words rather quickly

• never fully developed syntax or morphology

Critical Periods

• Other critical periods?

• Some birds will follow first moving object they see within the first day or two (mother or not)

• Some birds have a critical period in learning their group’s (species+region) bird song.

• Other fields also talk about critical periods

• vision

• musical ability (perfect pitch)

• ...

Stages of Development

0. Prelinguistic

• babies make noises, but not yet babbling

• crying, cooing

• response to some stimuli (hunger, discomfort...)

• sensitive to native and non-native sound distinctions


1. Babbling

• starts at about 6 months of age

• not linked to biological needs

• pitch and intonation resemble language spoken around them


2. One-word

• begins around age 1

• speaks one-word sentences (called ‘holophrastic’)

• usually 1-syllable words, with CV structure

• consonant clusters reduced

• words learned as a whole, rather than a sequence of sounds

• ‘easier’ sounds produced earlier

• Manner:

nasals > glides > stops > liquids > fricatives > affricates

• Place:

labials > velars > alveolars > palatals

• better perception than production (e.g. difficult sounds like [r])


2. One-word: Utterances Child Adult

1 don’t [dot] [dont]

2 skip [khɪp] [skɪp]

3 shoe [su] [ʃu]

4 that [dæt] [ðæt]

5 play [pheɪ] [phleɪ]

6 thump [dʌp] [θʌmp]

7 bath [bæt] [bæθ]

8 chop [thɑp] [tʃɑp]

9 kitty [khɪdi] [khɪɾi]

10 light [wɑɪt] [lɑɪt]

11 dolly [dɑwi] [dɑli]

12 grow [ɡo] [ɡro]


3. two-word stage

• starts at about 1.5-2 years of age

• vocabulary of +/- 50 words

• sentences consist of two words (telegraphic)

• e.g. allgone sock

• those two words could have a number of relations

• e.g. Daddy car

• usually lacks function words

• usually lacks inflectional morphology


3. two-word stage

• occur in fixed order (depending on language)

• agent + action baby sleep

• action + object kick ball

• action + location sit chair

• entity + location teddy bed

• possessor + possession mommy book

• entity + attribute block red

• demonstrative + entity this shoe


4. beyond 2-word stage

• sentences with 3+ words (no 3-word stage)

• begins using function words

• have already learned some aspects of grammar:

• word order (e.g. SVO in English, SOV in Japanese)

• position of determiners

• etc.

• grammar resembles adult grammar by about age 5

linguistics 101 language acquisition - university of...

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